One gets a very strange feeling as they drive the looping curve of road
that leads to the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel from the New Jersey side.
From here, particularly when the traffic was going slow, you could always
look over to your left and see the whole of lower Manhattan laid out in
all its splendor.

These days, one searches for the two gleaming towers that dominated the
tip of the island. Surely it is a dream. Surely, this time they will be
there. They are not.

As September 11, 2002 approaches, I keep thinking we should build those
same two towers again.

I
keep thinking of lunches and dinners in Windows on the World, the splendid
restaurant that topped out one of the towers and, from which, walking
the full perimeter of the floor, one could look out at the extraordinary
urban landscape that is New York City and its boroughs, and across the
river, New Jersey. Down below, one could see the Statue of Liberty, looking
very tiny in the harbor.

It makes me angry.

It makes me angry to think that two planes, filled with innocent people,
were turned into flying bombs that literally decimated these two great
structures, these monuments to the economic vitality of this nation.

I want those towers back!

Forget about the new designs. They have already been dismissed and an
international search is on for still more. I say, take out the architectural
plans for the Twin Towers and rebuild them! Tell the crazed Islamists
that they did not achieve anything and will not achieve anything. They
have signed the death warrant for fanatical, fundamentalist Islam.

Many years ago, I visited the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. I was
a child when the Japanese sneak attack awoke a sleeping nation, an isolationist
nation, to the reality that it had real enemies. Ironically, the boat
I took to get out to the site was filled mostly with Japanese tourists.
What struck me, once we got there, was that they would pause to pray in
front of the names of those who died that day, December 7, 1941, "a
day that will live in infamy."

The Arizona Memorial is a place of silence broken only by the waters
that lap at the twisted, rusting metal of the ship below and the beautiful
arching structure above.

I want the new Twin Towers to be a bustling, noisy place, filled with
people coming and going. Most will have been born after 9-11 and perhaps
some will pause to look at a wall filled with the names of the more than
2,800 who died there on a long ago day in 2001.

I want the Towers back! I want them because this is America and we will
not be defeated.

Alan Caruba writes "Warning Signs", a weekly column posted
at www.anxietycenter.com,
the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center. (c) Alan Caruba, 2002

Other related stories: (open in a new window)

Why we must build
bigger and better on the World Trade Center site by Sherri R. Tracinski
(July 22, 2002)
Architect Sherri R. Tracinski wants to see a memorial at the site of
the World Trade Center but she doesn't want that to be the primary focus.
She also wants to send a message to those who destroyed it